The Biden administration and congressional Democrats are advancing a budget proposal that would massively expand the social safety net. That has renewed public debate about the proper size of the federal government.
But how do ordinary Americans think about government and its reach? My research suggests that some Midwesterners with conservative leanings prefer another route instead of federal intervention for supporting those in need: communities taking care of their own members through local churches and nonprofits.
That’s what I learned from two years of in-depth interviews with residents of a small, predominantly White, conservative county in Indiana that I’ll call Meriville. Social scientists have repeatedly found that White Americans are less likely to favor social supports when they imagine that “undeserving” minorities will benefit. I learned what Merivillians do support: community provision.
How I did my research
I conducted 132 in-depth interviews with 56 Merivillians between April 2019 and July 2021, a period that included both the coronavirus pandemic and the 2020 presidential election. These included one interview each with 26 community leaders, such as elected officials, activists from both parties, nonprofit leaders, and pastors, as well as four rounds of interviews with 30 “ordinary” residents who did not fit those categories.
I began repeated interviews with residents during two months of in-person research in Meriville over the summer and fall of 2019. During this time, I captured participants’ baseline political opinions before the 2020 presidential campaign kicked into gear.
I began a second round of interviews in March 2020, just after the coronavirus pandemic shut down in-person fieldwork, conducting these interviews over the phone or on Skype. I carried out a third round of interviews in late April and May 2020, and a final round in September, October and November 2020, just before the election.
I also followed up with undecided voters in the days after the election and returned to Meriville in July 2021 to ask residents their views on the Biden administration.
The Biden infrastructure bills would restore America’s traditional approach to economic growth
Learning that communities can take care of people
Churches — a mix of evangelical, mainline Protestant and Catholic — are a central part of community life in Meriville. It’s not just that many residents are churchgoers; church membership in Meriville is intensive. Out of my 30 “ordinary” participants, 17 described volunteering with their church in leadership roles, youth groups or Sunday school.
This has two consequences for Meriville community life. First, churches provide ready pools of financial resources and willing volunteers, who will pitch in to help well beyond their own congregations. Civic and nonprofit leaders then draw on these to address emerging social problems, particularly hunger and homelessness.
Second, when churches and nonprofits act, residents learn of their activities through their own congregations and social networks — and view these as successful ways to meet the community’s needs. Larry, for example, explained: “I think the feeding of people … Meriville County would be an example of where it gets done, in my opinion. … I think people are being fed locally.” (To protect research subjects’ identities, all the names used here are pseudonyms, including “Larry” and “Meriville.”)
Meriville does, in fact, struggle with hunger, housing and the opioid addiction crisis. Some residents told me that the persistence of these problems shows that the community does not successfully address them or their root causes. But because local efforts to solve these issues are so visible, those I spoke with overwhelmingly concluded that in Meriville, as Todd put it, “we always take care of our own.” Even Democrats and independents like Todd think of their community this way.
Community provision over government intervention
Regardless of Meriville’s actual success at solving problems, the fact that residents understand their community as the appropriate source of help affects how they think about welfare provision on a national scale. Merivillians agree that people who can take care of themselves should. But even when participants recognize that someone has a legitimate need, they rarely call on the federal government to resolve it.
Instead, they call on their community. Hugh, a Democrat who cast his first-ever Republican vote for Donald Trump in 2020, told me: “Our country was built on small communities taking care of each other. And now everybody thinks the federal government’s got to take care of it. And that’s not the case. I think the states need to take care of their states with a little assistance from the federal government.”
Often, participants arrived at conclusions like Hugh’s by reflecting on their own experiences in Meriville. When I asked Mallory how “our society” might best take care of people’s basic needs, she responded, “I think the things we’re doing now.” She then went on to list a litany of local nonprofit and church-based efforts to feed the hungry.
Takeaways
My research suggests that some conservatives are not just against social welfare but that they are for local communities taking care of themselves.
This is not an argument that the government should rely on local nonprofits rather than federal agencies to provide public goods. In fact, the United States’ long history of providing social welfare through local charities has preserved racial inequalities and exacerbated problems with access to resources in underserved communities. Even in Meriville, these solutions aren’t really answers to systemic social problems such as high rates of poverty and opioid overdoses.
The data from Meriville does suggest that to understand how conservatives think about what they’d like their government to do, Democrats and liberals might wish to stop thinking that all conservatives are selfish. Instead, those living in places like Meriville might simply prefer to meet basic needs from within their communities and leave the federal government out of it.
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Stephanie Ternullo (@StephanieTern) is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Chicago, where she studies American political behavior and political and urban sociology.